Monday, May 5, 1997

Bondage To The Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust by
Michael Steinlauf

Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1997

189 pp. $ 16.95

It is a tradition at Passover Seders I attend to sing “Zog
nisht keynmol” (“Don’t Ever Say,”), the Yiddish anthem of the 1943 Warsaw
Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, when the poorly armed, starving remnant of
Warsaw’s Jewry held off German troops for a month before the Ghetto was razed
entirely. We were singing this, as is the custom, several years ago, when the
rendition was transformed, made unforgettable for me, by the presence among us
of someone who had seen the Ghetto burn.

As a boy, Jurek joined onlookers on the Aryan side, watching
in pain, knowing, without knowing why, that a part of him was burning behind
the wall. Jurek was a Jew — though he did not know it at the time — whose
mother, in an act of what he called “shamanistic foresight,” deposited him in a
monastery several years before the war broke out. By the time of this seder, he
had long since been aware of his origins, which is not to say the process of
reconciling Jew and Pole was — if it ever would be — complete. I found myself
caught in the machinery of reconciliation when I made a careless, accusatory
remark about the role of Poles in the Holocaust to which Jurek, moved as he had
been by hearing the song of the Warsaw Ghetto sung in Massachusetts,
nevertheless took immediate exception.